Links

It was my pleasure to get the email from Saikeo, one of the translation validator of Lao version of WordPress saying that he and the university he’d graduated would invite me to Vientiane, Laos to have a WordPress meetup.

I am very happy that I could meet all of you and that we shared my experiences.

After I got the invitation, I began thinking what I should share with you in the first WordPress meetup in Laos.

From what I heard from Saikeo,

there are no experienced WordPress developer at least at the meetup

students mainly belong to the faculty of engineering in the national university of Laos

you are learning programing languages such as java, VB .net and a little php

no WordPress courses

The wants I guessed you might have were,

How to install WordPress

How to use WordPress

How to create websites

How to make a original themes

and it turned out to be right when I asked you in the meetup.

But I did not talk anything around how-to’s or tech topics.

Instead, I decided to share the experience of mine and other WordPress people.

WordPress has changed my and my family’s life, and I know that it did so to other people’s lives. I know WordPress can do so to your lives, too.

I summarized what happened to my life after I found WordPress and brought the words by interviewing WordPress people from Asian countries who run global businesses.

I thought The most helpful thing I could pass you was the hope, passion and enthusiasm to learn WordPress and build your future by yourselves.

I talked about the time I was learning html/css/javascript/photoshop/illustrator and WordPress, which was the period I just lost my job and we were expecting our first daughter. I remember that this “no money for half a year” part was most exciting part in my talk.

I shared the words by my WordPress friends in Asian countries. One example was by Sakin from catchthemes.com.

Today, 25% of the world’s websites are in WordPress, and anyone can contribute to the ecosystem, from anywhere in the world.

This sentence was of course a surprise to the students.

You don’t have to be a hard-core programmer to be successful.
You don’t need an academic degree.
The barrier to entry is very low.

This is very true, because I’m not at all a talented programmer, I have no academic degree, and WordPress community welcomed me when I was a early stage learner.

After sharing the experiences of mine and others, I addressed 3 things I think are important for the you to learn if you want to follow the WP people.

learning coding skills. html/css/javascript, php, and WordPress way.

learning how to learn. finding the right resources.

English

I remember the reactions you made when I said the most important thing was English. You were both surprised and a little bit disappointed. Maybe you don’t feel comfortable in learning it.

From my experience, English is a really big key to open the door. And it is much more important for you, students in Laos to be able to read and speak English if we look at the amount of resources, activeness of community, and the size of market.

Here, I want to suggest you again what will make your WordPress life happier. Have a meetup group and run meetups regularly. The topics can be anything. Maybe you don’t even need a topic. You don’t need to have a teacher at the meetup. No one need to stand on stage and speak. You can just gather and learn together, share your knowledge, google things and install WordPress.

Help Needed

I want to ask the community people in the world to go to Laos and join meetups. Contact person can be me or Saikeo. Topics can be installing, translating, theming and so on!

Strict Standards:Declaration of WP_Import::bump_request_timeout()should be compatible with WP_Importer::bump_request_timeout($val)in/Users/papa/Sites/theme-review.loc/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-importer/wordpress-importer.php on line38

The number increasing everytime…

The title of this meetup was “How to design and create theme faster and better” and so we talked about html/css/js frameworks, starter theme and child theme.

We knew that we get many audience if we have something around design as our topic, but it was more than expected. Some people couldn’t come in to the place and had to sit outside and talk there. We need to limit the registration or find a bigger place.

We plan to have many different type of topics from dev/tech to design, contribution and blogging. Next one is “blogging” and might be more people.

Community organizer group

Meetup is run by volunteer community, just the way as the other meetups are and I’m really glad at the fact we can discuss and prepare together for the coming meetups.

I want more people to speak

So far, the meetup and community are growing but if I have any concern, it’s about the speakers. All the speakers we’ve had in the past meetups were great and I’m sure that the next blogging meetup will be great.

But still, I think there are more people who can share their experience and thought. There will be more fun for themselves if they do some presentations. I thought there should be an easy start position to be in front of people, and at the next meetup we introduce Lightning Talk time, where people who want to do 3 to 5 minutes presentations can come and share their blogs or products. I hope this will work fine and they will be the future speakers.

After the main session, I had a little talk in Thai about the WP communities in Japan. I talked about WordBench and people’s help and volunteer spirits and asked for help to organize the future meetups.

Now we have a team of 20 Thai people to organize the meetups. We are now exchanging ideas of the future meetups. I wish they will be the future leaders and there will be more events and community. I hope I can bring something similar to what I got at the community in Japan.

Looking a short look at WordPress.com and see how similar/different it is from .org and.The next meetup will be on underscores ( _s )Mr. Menn talked about almost all the criteria a theme need to fulfill.After the sessionThe community grows slowly and nicely!

By changing the main language, I could see many different people in this country while we lost some who don’t speak Thai. There are people who are willing to have some in English like Julien from N2Clic and I think we need to make some effort to combine them or devide them? Let’s see what happens when I’ve done more events here.

Anyway, it was very nice that we had more people who were interested in developing things with WordPress and I could share the basic of creating plugins.

The topic was more about business model than tech, and the guests were 2 co-founder of Pronto Marketing.

Pronto Marketing is a company with 70+ employees based in Bangkok which offers website/marketing solutions for small business owners in US, Canada and other English speaking countries.

For clients, they create really nice design websites, write everything, mail customers’ customers, host WordPress and keep it always updated and more. Shortly, they do almost everything that a small business would need for their websites and give the clients time to concentrate on their own business. They charge basically $247 per month.

The talk title was “Get involved in WordPress”, was about how to contribute to WordPress and here’s a list of hows (I made memo of the talk but couldn’t write them all so I researched by myself too. It’s a bit different from Siobhan’s talk.)

Handbooks are the new documentations. There are two kinds of handbooks, for Developers and for Contributors.

Inline Documentations are docs in the core files. It’s a nice way of getting involved for you who understand code if you read, but maybe it’s difficult to write patches with codes. Inline documentations will not only be just inside the core files but also will be extracted from core to new website.

Somebody wants to turn wordpress.org web site into responsive?

And off course the core. It maybe fun to look at WordPress core components because there you can choose topic you want to try.